Encyclopædia Iranica

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Eskandar Firouz, D. T. Potts

Capra aegagrus, also called Persian Wild Goat, in Persian pāzan. It is regarded as the ancestor of the domestic goat. Formerly it was numerous, found in almost all of Persia’s mountainous areas with rugged cliffs.

Kaveh Ehsani

N. Sims-Williams, D. Testen

the representation of language by means of “ideograms,” that is, symbols representing “ideas,” rather than (or usually side by side with) symbols which represent sounds. i. Terminology and conventions. ii. Ideographic writing in the Ancient Near East.

Stefano Carboni

The Il-khanid period (ca. 1260-ca. 1335) is no doubt the historical moment during which the art of painting, in particular in illustrated manuscripts, witnessed a dramatic increase in number, subject matter, artistic output, and patronage. The late 13th century and especially the first quarter of the 14th can be regarded as perhaps the most important formative period in the history of Persian painting, an epoch of great changes.

Peter Morgan

This entry deals with glazed wares and tiles of the so-called “Sultanabad” (Solṭānābād) group, lajvardina (< Pers. lājvard “lapis lazuli”) wares, and luster wares produced in the Il-khanid period. The period extends from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the last dated luster tiles made in 1339.

Multiple Author

M. Rezazadeh Shafarudi

Until the mid-1930s Ilam was known as the Poštkuh of Lorestān as opposed to the Piškuh of Lorestān, which was located in the eastern part of the region. Since the Ṣafavid era Lorestān had been administered under the wālis (governors-general), who came from the chieftains of Lor-e Kuček tribes.

Lutz Richter-Bernburg

Yuri Bregel

name of two rulers of Ḵᵛārazm in the 16th and 18th centuries: (1) Ilbārs Khan b. Buräkä (or Bürgä), from the ʿArab-šāhi (q.v.) branch of the Jochids, was the founder of the dynasty which ruled Ḵᵛārazm from 1511 to the end of the 17th century.

Multiple Authors

Christopher J. Brunner

This entry presents a series of survey articles on selected areas of interaction and mutual influence between the two culture areas, including overviews of the enormous body of literature produced in India in the Persian language.

Richard M. Eaton

Relations between peoples of the Iranian plateau and India were extensive and uninterrupted between the 13th and 18th centuries. Migration, commerce, and politics all led to a range of cross-regional influences.

Mansour Bonakdarian

By the time of Āqā Moḥammad Khan’s founding of the Qajar dynasty in 1796, Persia’s diplomatic relations with the Mughal empire and other territories in the Indian subcontinent were gradually passing under the supervision of British authorities in India.

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Scott C. Levi

Indo-Persian commercial relations were mediated by merchants originating from India, Persia, Afghanistan, and later Europe. Ethnic minority groups, such as Armenians and Jews, also played an important role in Persia’s international commercial relations.

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Christopher Shackle

Some Persian elements are present in most of the modern languages of the subcontinent of South Asia, as a consequence of the prolonged cultivation of Persian associated with pre-modern Indo-Muslim culture.

Barbara Schmitz

During the 17th century, the flow of artistic influences between Persia and India reversed. Paintings and drawings in the developed Mughal style of the first quarter of the century were imported to the courts and bazaars of Isfahan.

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Masashi Haneda

Although emigration from the Iranian plateau to the Indian subcontinent is not a phenomenon specific to any particular period, the trend does seem to have grown after the foundation of Muslim governments on the subcontinent.

Scott C. Levi

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

Indian communities in Afghanistan performed an array of commercial functions in both the private and state sectors that served to integrate the Afghan economy and link it to surrounding markets in Central and South Asia.

D. T. Potts

Carol Bier

(Pers. nil), the common name of a broad genus, Indigofera, with numerous species. Many tribal groups in Persia have relied on the use of indigo to achieve a stable blue color for the wool of carpets and kilims.

Osmund Bopearachchi

Elena Bashir

This article surveys Indo-Iranian frontier languages the territory of present-day Pakistan, which have been under the cultural and linguistic influence of successive stages of the Persian language since the time of the Achaemenid Empire.

Gherardo Gnoli

Christine Fröhlich

While maritime disturbances were known to have driven merchants to use the caravan routes, during the periods of Mughal-Safavid rivalry over Kandahar merchants would temporarily favor the more predictable maritime routes.

Cross-Reference

R. C. Senior

from Maues, the first (Indo-)Scythian king of India (ca. 120-85 BCE) to the mid-1st century CE. When precisely Maues arrived in India is uncertain, but the expulsion of the Scythian (Saka/Sai) peoples from Central Asia is referred to in the Han Shu.

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Multiple Authors

: the foundation and development of modern industries in 20th-century Iran. Although generally characterized as an oil economy, Iran has a relatively rich history of industrialization going back to the early 20th century.

Hassan Hakimian

Archaic and underdeveloped infrastructure as well as a low level of human resources were limiting factors; however, changes after the 1920s, paved the way for the emergence of Iran’s nascent industrial sector from the 1930s onwards.

M. Karshenas and H. Hakimian

Public sector investment in this period started from a very slender base but soon witnessed an annual growth rate of 25 percent in real terms; more than 68 percent of government investment went into economic infrastructure.

Parvin Alizadeh

Available evidence indicates that the share of the manufacturing sector in the economy declined after the Revolution; it was around 19-20 percent of non-oil GDP by 1977 but dropped to about 15 percent by 1990.

Aliy I. Kolesnikov

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Steven C. Anderson

members of the mammalian order, small animals with several conservative anatomical characteristics. They retain five digits on all limbs and walk or run with soles and heels on the ground (plantigrade). Three families are represented in Persia and Afghanistan: hedgehogs, family Erinaceidae; moles, family Talpidae; and shrews, family Soricidae.

Steven C. Anderson

The insects of Persia and Afghanistan belong to the Palearctic fauna, although in the eastern and southeastern parts of the region there are representatives of the Oriental fauna characteristic of the Indian subcontinent.

Amir A. Afkhami

the institute for bacteriology and vaccination founded by the Persian government in 1921 as a branch of Institut Pasteur of Paris. The idea of establishing an institute for microbiological research and immunology in Iran was conceived in the aftermath of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic in Persia.

Claus V. Pedersen

(INSTITUT FOR IRANSK FILOLOGI), University of Copenhagen. i. Forerunners. ii. History. Although the Institute was founded only in 1961, it has a long prehistory, since it is the natural culmination of about 200 years of Iranian studies in the Kingdom of Denmark.

Paul E. Walker

founded in 1977 by H. H. Prince Karim Aga Khan, a gathering point for the Ismaili community’s interest in its own history and in its relationship with the larger world of Islamic scholarship and contemporary thought.

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Susan Whitfield

(IDP), founded in 1994, a collaboration among libraries, museums, and research institutes worldwide to conserve, catalogue, digitize and research archeological artifacts, manuscripts, and archives relating to the archeological sites of Central Asia during the period of the ‘Silk Road.’

Steven C. Anderson

IN IRAN, AFGHANISTAN, AND NEIGHBORING CENTRAL ASIA. This category includes all animals without a vertebral column. Thus it is a term of convenience that, though widely used, has little biological meaning.

E. Badian

the unsuccessful uprising of the Greek cities of Asia Minor against Achaemenid control, 499-493 BCE. The main and almost the only source for the Revolt is Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The revolt of the Ionians and of some Aeolians joining them had clearly not been a spontaneous rising. Dislike of Persian rule does seem, at this time, to have been universal among the western subjects.

Gen'ichi Tsuge

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Annemarie Schimmel

spiritual father of Pakistan and leading Persian and Urdu poet of India in the first half of the 20th century (1877-1938). He was well versed in the various fields of European philosophy and thought. He was equally well read in the Eastern tradition, and special mention should be made of his analysis of Persian thought in his thesis of 1907.

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari

Multiple Authors

The following sub-entries will provide an overview of the unifying factors which constitute Iran through time and across space, while also showing the complexity and heterogeneity of the components of Iranian culture.

Xavier de Planhol

Ehsan Yarshater

This section provides a concise introduction to the history of Iran from its beginnings to modern times. The generally recognized periods of the country’s history are reviewed, and some of the major motifs or themes in the politics or culture of the various periods are discussed.

Ehsan Yarshater

Iran in the Islamic Period (651-1980s). This section of Persian history begins with the conquest by Muslim Arabs and the introduction of Islam to Persia, the gradual conversion of the Persians to the faith of the conquerors, and some 200 years of Arab rule.

Ehsan Yarshater

Ehsan Yarshater

The Qajar dynasty (1779-1924). The Qajar were a Turkmen tribe who first settled during the Mongol period in the vicinity of Armenia and were among the seven Qezelbāš tribes that supported the Safavids.

John R. Hinnells

In the study of religion, myths are seen as narratives which encapsulate fundamental truths about the nature of existence, god(s), God(s), the universe. They explain the origin of the world or of a tribe or of a ritual.

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Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The term “Iranian language” is applied to any language which is descended from a proto-Iranian parent language (unattested by texts) spoken, presumably, in Central Asia in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE.

Philip Huyse

CHARLES-HENRI DE FOUCHÉCOUR

We will pay special attention to the early formation and origins of different literary genres in Persian works, even though the very notion of literary genres is somewhat arbitrary and a subject of continuing debate.

Philip G. Kreyenbroek

Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst and Philip G. Kreyenbroek

Called after the founding prophet Mani (216-74 or 277), Manicheism was a syncretistic religion that, combining elements of the various religions current in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau at the time, claimed to be the ultimate religion.

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Vahe Boyajian

Nassereddin Parvin

the first philatelic magazine ever published in Persia; it was published from Mehr 1302 to Bahman 1311 Š. (September 1923-February 1933) as the organ of Kolub-e bayn-al-melali-e Irān, a society founded by Naṣr-Allāh Falsafi (q.

Afshin Marashi

(1881-1938), a prominent member of the Zoroastrian community of Bombay. He was trained and worked as a professional lawyer, but at the same time he was also active as a philanthropist and scholar of Zoroastrianism and Persian literature.

Multiple Authors

collective feeling by Iranian peoples of belonging to the historic lands of Iran. This sense of identity, defined both historically and territorially, evolved from a common historical experience and cultural tradition.

Gherardo Gnoli

Ahmad Ashraf

While Syria and Egypt lost their languages under the hegemony of Arabic, Iran survived as the main cultural area in the emerging Islamic empire that maintained its distinct linguistic and cultural identity.

Ahmad Ashraf

Comparative historians of nationalism acknowledge that Iran was among the few nations that experienced the era of nationalism with a deep historical root and experience of recurrent construction of its own pre-modern identity.

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EIr

Manouchehr Kasheff

an encyclopedic collection of articles published under the auspices of the UNESCO National Commission in Iran. The ambitious idea, as presented in the preface of the first volume, was to produce a highly reliable condensed, but comprehensive, sourcebook covering every aspect of the civilization of Iran from ancient times to 1960.

Jamshid Behnam

monthly Persian journal, published in forty-eight issues in Berlin by Ḥosayn Kāẓemzāda Irānšahr, June 1922 to February 1927. Two principal tendencies can be distinguished in these articles: a strong interest in ancient Persia and its language and culture, and belief in the potency of a nationalistic spirit.

Jamshid Behnam

(1884-1962), ardent Iranian nationalist active during the First World War, prolific author on political, religious, and educational subjects, and publisher of the journal Irānšahr 1922-27; he resided in Berlin 1917-36, in Switzerland thereafter.

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Abbas Milani

a journal of Iranian studies, began publication under the editorship of Jalāl Matini and with the help of generous Iranians who have been willing to subsidize it since the spring of 1989, when its first issue was published.

J. Richard Irvine

Multiple Authors

the southern part of Mesopotamia, known in the early Islamic period as del-e Irānšahr (lit. “the heart of the kingdom of Iran”), served as the central province of the Sasanian empire as well as that of the ʿAbbasid caliphate.

Michael Morony

The late Sasanid era. The late Sasanid winter capital was located at the urban complex on the Tigris river called “the cities” (al-Madāʾen) by the Arabs that included Ctesiphon, Aspānpur, Veh-Antioḵ-e Ḵosrow, and Veh-Ardašir.

Ernest Tucker

Mohsen M. Milani

Relations between Iran and Iraq underwent three different phases between 1921, when Britain installed Faysal Ibn Hossein as king of a newly formed nation-state of Iraq and 1979, when the Pahlavi dynasty was swept away by revolution.

Nassereddin Parvin

Oscar White Muscarella

In Iran the term Iron Age is employed to identify a cultural change that occurred centuries earlier than the time accorded its use elsewhere in the Near East, and not to acknowledge the introduction of a new metal technology.

David Pingree

Sebastian Brock

bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Catholicos of the Church of the East (399-410). At the importnt church synod held, with permission of the Sasanian king, not long before his death, he worked with Marutha, bishop of Maipharqat, to obtain the approval of the creed of the Council of Nicaea (325) on the part of the Church of the East.

Multiple Authors

EIr, Xavier de Planhol

The province consists of 52 hydrological units belonging to 9 basins and 27 sub-basins. Rivers are small and temporary, with the exception of the Zāyandarud, which totals 405 km in length, with an average annual discharge of 1,053 mcm, average annual precipitation of 450 mm, and a basin area of 27,100 km.2.

Heidi Walcher

Moḥammad-Mahdi Arbāb, a native of Isfahan, maintained that, at the time of Nāṣer-al-Din Shah’s accession in 1848, there were 200,000 city inhabitants, with that number decreasing to about 80,000 for a period before growing again.

Habibollah Zanjani

In 2001, the sub-provinces of Isfahan (with more than 1.6 million), Kāšān, and Najafabād (with more than 300,000) were the most populated, while the sub-provinces of Naṭanz, Fereydunšahr, and Ardestān were the least populated with populations of less than 50,000 persons.

Habibollah Zanjani

As the capital of Isfahan Province, the city accounted, in 1996, for about 32.2 percent of the total population of the province and 43.4 percent of its urban population. Isfahan is also the third most populated city in the country, behind Tehran and Mashad.

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

Isfahan’s monuments developed in the early medieval period first under the ʿAbbāsid caliphate and Buyid patronage. But many of the extant monuments of Isfahan date to the periods in history when the city served as the capital of the ruling dynasties of the Great Saljuqs (1040-1194) and the Safavids (1501-1722).

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

European visitors to Safavid Persia, for example, found themselves increasingly bound by Isfahan, where they were able to gain a royal audience or conduct their business with the court and government bureaucracy without having to follow the itinerant monarchs.

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

Isfahan is known historically for its large number of mosques. According to Abu Noʿaym of Isfahan, the first large mosque in Isfahan was built during the Caliphate of Imam ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb (r. 656-61). The French traveler Jean Chardin counted 162 mosques during his travels to Isfahan in the middle of the 17th century.

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

The earliest extant madrasa in Isfahan is the 1325 Emāmi Madrasa, which is also known as the Madrasa-ye Bābā Qāsem after the name of its first teacher, who is buried in a nearby tomb. As in Persian mosque type, this and most other madrasas in Persia follow the four-ayvān courtyard-centered plan.

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

On the southern edge of the city of Isfahan lies the Zāyandarud River, the unnavigable river that has been the major source of water in the region since the earliest settlements in its environs. Until the transfer of the Safavid capital to Isfahan in the late 16th century, the river was well outside the city walls.

Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

Massumeh Farhad

The “Isfahan” school of painting and calligraphy generally refers to works of art associated with the city, when it was chosen as the Safavid capital. The school has two distinct phases of first the followers of Reżā ʿAbbāsi and then the European style.

Willem Floor

It is one of the best-preserved examples of a large, enclosed, and covered bazaar complex that was typical of most cities in the Muslim world prior to the 20th century. The oldest areas of the present-day bazaar date from the early 17th century; its first stone was laid in 1603.

Habib Borjian and EIr

Isfahan has maintained its position as a major center for traditional crafts in Persia. The crafts of Isfahan encompass textiles, carpets, metalwork, woodwork, ceramics, painting, and inlay works of various kind. The work is carried out in different settings including small industrial and bazaar workshops, in the homes of craftsmen and women, and in rural cottage industries.

Habib Borjian

The distribution of economic activities within Isfahan, with an urbanism of 76 percent, is highly uneven. The oasis of Isfahan, watered by the Zāyandarud, is responsible for nearly half of rural activities.

Maryam Borjian and Habib Borjian

The Lazarists, with the support of the prince-governor, founded in 1875 schools for both boys and girls and an infirmary. These appear to be the predecessors of the boys school L’Etoile du Matin and the girls school Rudāba.

Cross-Reference

Amnon Netzer

According to Armenian sources, the Sasanian Šāpūr II transferred many Jews from Armenia and settled them in Isfahan. According to the Middle Persian text Šahristānihā ī Ērān, Yazdegerd I settled Jews in Jay (Gay) at the request of his Jewish wife Šōšan-doḵt.

Donald Stilo

The Jewish dialects of Isfahan, Kāshān, Hamadān, Borujerd, Yazd, Kermān and others belong to the Central dialect group of Northwestern Iranian. All of Northwestern Iranian languages, in turn, are descended from Median.

Donald Stilo

The Iranian languages of Isfahan Province are of three basic types: Northwest Iranian dialects belonging to the Central Plateau Dialect group, and two different types of Southwest Iranian languages: slightly divergent dialects of Persian and large pockets of Lori.

Donald Stilo

Gazi belongs to the Central Plateau Dialect group of Northwestern Iranian (NWI) languages. Gazi, the Jewish dialect of Isfahan, Sedehi, and probably other uninvestigated dialects of the area are grouped together as one subgroup of CPD.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Ursula Sims-Williams

(Eslām-āḵūn), treasure-seeker and swindler active in Khotan and neighboring areas between 1894 and 1901, best known, however, as an adept forger of manuscripts and block prints. He was eventually unmasked by Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) in 1901.

Verena Klemm

Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi

By “political Shiʿism” we mean here the politicization of theological and legal doctrines of Twelver Shiʿism among some thinkers, in order to make of these doctrines an ideology of legitimization of religious authority and power.

David Cook

The term jihad (Ar. jehād “struggle, striving”) occurs (either in its root or derivatives) about forty times in the Qurʾān with the secondary, but dominant, meaning of “regulated warfare with divine sanction.”

David Yeroushalmi

Shaul Shaked

A department of Iranian Studies was only formally established in Israel in 1970, but scholars working in Israel have been interested in aspects of Iranian history and culture since long before that date.

RACHEL MILSTEIN

Iron Age II-III is represented by a few clay rhytons, including one with human face and hands; anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels; tiny animals made of baked clay and frit; a metal figurative comb; an Elamite figure of a goddess; a finial of a standard portraying two lions from Luristan; and various kinds of daily objects.

Mario Casari

A privileged relationship between Iran and Italy dates back to the age of the ancient Roman and Persian empires. Despite their ever-changing internal affairs, the two political centers of Europe and Asia, throughout the entire ancient time, experienced long lasting contacts.

Mario Casari

during the Middle Ages, when Italy and Persia were not clearly definable cultural entities, the translated works of significant Persian literature had a great influence on Italian and European culture.

Paola Orsatti

M. V. Fontana

ix. PERSIAN ART COLLECTIONS Since the Middle Ages, Italians have been some of the greatest collectors of Islamic art in Europe. The Islamic market that Italy drew on was very large, and some of the most opulent works were imported from Persia.

Carlo G. Cereti

Studies on subjects related to the Iranian cultural world can boast an ancient tradition in Italy, but not as an independent field of study at academic level. Things have considerably changed in recent times.

Farhad Daftary

(1886-1970), Russian orientalist and leading pioneer in modern Ismaʿili studies. In November 1920 Ivanow went to India in the company of an Anglo-Indian force. In 1928 Ivanow went to Persia to collect manuscripts for the Asiatic Society.